Show HN: Learn a new language by speaking with AI | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Learn a new language by speaking with AI

fluent.im

39 pointsachempion34 comments

Hi, you should flip the animated illustration. It's driving users' gazes (mine included) out of the page.

Oh, and about the second illustration: it's telling me to press the big red button... and then nothing happens.

It stops the animation for me.

However I think it would be more useful if the figure would say something that converts the user to the signup e.g. "Playtime is over, time to learn" and the button would turn into sign up as well.

Really like the idea. As someone who has been losing his limited spanish since college, I've been wanting something like this.

A couple pieces of feedback:

- It would be very useful to be able to get text translations of just one word at a time. Currently, I can give up entirely and have the whole message translated for me. But there's no way to just get help with the one word I can't remember the meaning of

- It would be very useful to be able to hide the text by default. I am interested in this app only because I am pretty bad at listening to spanish. That said, I am quite a bit better at reading it. Having the text always appear ruins my ability to practice listening

- The language selector at the top has 5 vertical bars that can be dark or not. I believe this might be a difficulty indicator? But it's not very clear

- When I speak some words are yellow. I assume this means my pronunciation was off leading the AI to not be very confident. That could also be a lot more clear

edit: fix formatting

Please can you explain how translating a single word is different from using a dictionary?

Thanks a lot for the feedback. I thought about adding one-word translations but didn't think about hiding the text completely. The difficulty selector is disabled right now, which can be confusing. Thanks for pointing it out.

Calling it now, learning a language this way will be called having an AIccent, where you speak the language well enough, but use unusual words and stilted phrases that only RHLF'ed LLMs do. Instead of saying "no", you'll say "As a large language model, I can't do that".

Makes me wonder if any sci fi predicted this.

Yes, It’s important for us to delve further into this topic

What models did you base this on and were they benchmarked by professional translators in any way?

I wanted to try this, but I think you need to allow Chinese pinyin display instead of chinese characters for the chinese section as research shows that learning conversational chinese should happen before learning the characters. Without this change, I’m not really interested.

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that the pinyin is the way to go for Chinese. Do you think you would still want to see the Chinese characters and have an ability to flip between two character versions?

It would be nice, but for starters I just need pinyin.

I've seen a few apps attempt this, e.g. Talkpal (https://talkpal.ai)

Wonder how long it will take Duolingo to roll out a its own version

According to Duo themselves its already included in duolingo max -- https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-max/

Would it be useful for a friend of mine who mostly speaks Russian but wants to improve her English? Or is this solely intended for English speakers trying to learn other languages?

It's currently for English speakers trying to learn other languages. We'll probably add English as a target language at some point.

Good for English. Ok for Brasilian Portuguese. Subpar for a continental Portuguese. Somewhat usable for Russian.

Portuguese and Russian natives don't speak like that. The phrasing is incorrect.

I second this. I tried it in Italian (my native language), it doesn't really make obvious mistakes but the phrasing is often awkward and robotic, and it tends to "overcorrect" sentences when in fact they are correct and idiomatic Italian.

It also somehow tried to convince me to visit Galleria Borghese in Rome to see Michelangelo's David and The Birth of Venus (they are in fact at the Galleria dell'Accademia and at the Uffizi respectively, in Florence). But I guess that's par for the course for LLMs.

Wow. That's pretty amazing. I think it's above my level at the moment, though. Have you considered having different difficulty levels of conversation?

What do you find challenging in the current version? We can target these parts with difficulty levels

The conversation I had was about lost luggage at the airport, and what it looked like, and what was next. That's a pretty adult conversation. I did not understand what the "next steps" were without the translation, but I guess I did okay with the rest.

I did it in Japanese, which had the added problem of not knowing what some of the words were, though I recognized more of them when I had it speak them out loud.

It's possible I'm just not ready for a tool like this, though.

I was just thinking about how the conversational side of multi modal models is perfect for this.

I weep for the power consumption if this becomes popular but I still love it

Could argue this is efficient. Interestingly all the language teachers fired won’t stop consuming power.

What do you use for validating pronunciation?

Or do you just use a Speech To Text model and hope the text that comes of it is the expected phrase?

Possibly the first good use of AI chatbots so far since it doesn't really matter if the AI hallucinates. Pretty cool!

Well the AI could hallucinate the meaning of a sentence in a different way than the original, if that happens then it could be problematic.

Thanks, the hallucinations of AI can be a feature here as they could add a fun twist to the conversation

Memrise has one. It's infuriatingly sensitive - calling something stupid is enough for it to give a long lecture about using positive language only, and then huffily ending the conversation. I use Claude over ChatGPT for work for similar reasons - Claude is far less likely to get "offended".

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